We Know What You’re Watching This Fall: Amazon’s ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Series
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The time for teen slasher throwbacks is upon us. Some of those throwbacks, like Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, are carving out their own identity with semi-original new stories while openly homaging what’s come before them. Others, like Paramount’s upcoming Scream reboot, are going straight back to the well of tried-and-true properties with built-in name recognition at the ’90s multiplex. Amazon’s I Know What You Did Last Summer series is among the latter. It’s being co-produced by James Wan and now we have word on when exactly we’ll all know what you did last summer. You know what you did.
Collider and Deadline both report that Amazon Studios has confirmed an official October release, just in time for Halloween, for its I Know What You Did Last Summer television remake. This news comes out of the show’s Comic-Con panel.
That’s right: Comic-Con is still a thing this year and it’s going on right now, but only as an online event (Comic-Con@Home).
I Know What You Did Last Summer is billed as a “YA series, which is a modern take on the 1997 slasher.” The logline says nothing of a hook-wielding maniac in a fisherman’s coat, but if you’ve seen the movie, you may remember such a killer stalking a quartet of hot young stars: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Ryan Phillipe, and Freddie Prinze, Jr.
This time around, the cast includes Madison Iseman, Brianne Tju, Ezekiel Goodman, Ashley Moore, Sebastian Amoruso, Fiona Rene, Cassie Beck, Brooke Bloom, and Bill Heck. Oh, and here’s that logline:
“In a town full of secrets, a group of teenagers are stalked by a mysterious killer a year after a fatal accident on their graduation night.”
Who Knows What Anyone Did Last Summer?
One positive sign about this I Know What You Did Last Summer TV series is that it’s only eight episodes, which theoretically means that there should be less filler. Who knows, maybe it will even be better than the 1997 movie, which may hold some nostalgia value for us millennials but which currently sits at 44% on the Tomatometer.
Did anyone ever watch MTV/VH1’s Scream? The first season of that show came at a time when seemingly every 1996 movie under the sun was being developed into a TV series. First, there was From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series, the flagship show of Robert Rodriguez’s fledgling El Rey Network. Then there was Fargo, Noah Hawley’s still-going FX anthology, based on the Coen Brother’s Minnesota-nice crime classic. Then, there was Scream.
I Know What You Did Last Summer hit theaters in 1997, a year after Wes Craven’s original Scream movie, and it shared the same screenwriter, Kevin Williamson. Like Fear Street, it had a loose basis in its novelistic source material, with Lois Duncan‘s 1973 book of the same name.
Williamson is not involved with the new Amazon Prime series, but Wan is and he’s no stranger to the horror genre, having started with Saw and also helped kickstart The Conjuring and Insidious franchises. He was originally set to direct the pilot, but it looks like that is now no longer in the cards. So this may be one of those things where an established filmmaker lends their name to something as an executive producer without having much real creative input beyond that.
I Know What You Did Last Summer hits Amazon Prime in October.
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